When Director of Community Relations for Greenville Independent School District Brad Press originally planned to visit Dr. Lamar Bridges university public relations class in mid-March, he never thought that a week before he would have to deal with the biggest crisis in his career: the death of a student at Greenville High School.
“It was a day I would never like to re-live in my career,” Press said.
On March 7, a 16-year-old student killed himself in an instrument room off the band hall at the high school shortly after 7 a.m. Although no one was in the room at the time, his girlfriend had left the room a few minutes before.
“The young man shot himself in the chest with a hand gun,” Press said.
According to Press, since the room was sound-proof, no one heard the sound of the shot clearly. Instead, what band students heard was a thump, thinking it was someone hitting the wall from the inside or a book falling. A few minutes later, a fellow student found him on the floor and believed he had fallen and hit his head. Since he was lying on his stomach, the bloody bullet wound remained unnoticed. The concerned student located the assistant principal who realized there was “a situation” as soon as he turned over the student’s body.
The assistant principal called emergency medical services to help the still-alive teen. The EMS team responded and worked on the youth, removing him from the scene. Shortly after 8 a.m., the police chief notified school officials the young man had passed away.
“It is the biggest nightmare to lose a student – in whatever form,” Press said.
Press, a 15-year employee of GISD, received a call informing him that he was needed at the high school while he was still at home getting his children ready for school. He called his wife, a teacher in the district, and she came home to watch their children. At 7:50 a.m., he arrived at the high school.
Press said the primary goal then was to come up with a plan of action. From the beginning, we tried to keep the faculty and students informed at all times, Press said.
We kept students and teachers informed about what was happening throughout the day; when we found out the student died at 8:05 a.m., we made an announcement at 8:10, Press said.
A major challenge confronted Press almost immediately. Due to the high amount of students with cell phones, parents were rushing to the school to get their children based on one piece of information: There had been a shooting at the high school.
The scene in front of the school was pandemonium, Press said. A lady pulled off her high heels and darted across the lawn. Another stood in her pajamas yelling for her child. Then there was a car wreck.
“I put myself in the position of those parents and I can’t blame them one bit,” Press said. “When it’s your kids, you don’t always think rationally. You don’t think, ‘Ok, let’s find out what happened.’ All you see is your kids have been in a spot where there’s been a shooting.”
Press and other officials decided to let kids go home with parents or with a phone call from a parent. While many parents were pulling their children from classes, Press and the superintendent were meeting to discuss what to say to the media via a press release.
In the three-paragraph release posted on the GISD Web site, Press said there had been an apparent self-inflicted gun shot wound and no other students were injured. He also stated grief counselors from the area were offering their services for any student who needed it and school officials predicted the school day would go on as normal.
Press said the school did not go into lock-down with doors locked preventing students from leaving their current classrooms, although personnel were posted at the front doors to prevent unapproved people from entering.
About 8:15 a.m., media calls started coming fast and furious. Press said the media were denied access to the campus and directed to the Web site until a press conference later in the morning. Next, Press had to figure where to cordon off the media hordes soon to be on campus.
“Though it is a public building, we control who can go there, where they can go and what they can do. We were not about to let the media enter our building,” he said. Under federal law, media are not allowed to film public school students.
We set the media up in an area west of the ball field near the student parking lot, Press said. A maintenance worker parked a van between the area and student parking and stayed there all day to prevent media from talking to students.
Before the press conference, Press talked with more than 25 media people ranging from numerous radio stations to Dallas television stations to CNN and The New York Times. Early in the calls, he noticed many of the press people had been misinformed, thinking the student had shot himself in front of or near other students.
ccording to Press, a Greenville Herald Banner reporter talked to kids at a local restaurant that morning when researching the story. But those kids didn’t go to school that morning and told the reporter second-hand information. In a race to be first, the reporter posted her story on the Web with the inaccurate statement: “Witnesses reported the student shot himself in front of other students.”
When the Associated Press and other media sources researched the story, they took information off the site as accurate and the misinformation was spread wider. After a few calls, Press discovered how they got their “facts.” Although the newspaper corrected its site, the damage had been done. Coincidently, Press had worked at the Herald Banner when he was a journalism student at East Texas State University.
Press spent the majority of his afternoon trying to get various media sources to correct their Web sites.
“We had a 16-year-old student that shot himself on school grounds. That is a news story. Whether I like it or not, that is a news story,” Press said. “But they were coming out here with a particular zeal for the news story.”
Press attributed the media’s zeal as the reality of a post-Columbine world.
“Before Columbine High School, there were kids that got killed at high schools, (but) you just didn’t hear about it as much,” he said. “No local media outlet, no national media outlet wants to be the one who fell asleep and missed the next Columbine …”
Although his team tried to open about what they knew, he said they intentionally did not say the youth killed himself following problems with his girlfriend. If school officials had released this fact, they felt certain media people would have tried to contact the girl during the difficult time, Press said. That same day in a tragic coincidence, a Michigan teen took his life after shooting an ex-girlfriend four times in her high school’s parking lot.
Press said another fact GISD officials didn’t volunteer was another student had killed himself by hanging back in 1992. At the time, no Dallas media station came out to cover the story. He attributes this to it having occurred prior to Columbine.
At the morning press conference, the superintendent answered questions and helped to gain control on what the media reported for the rest of the day.
Following the tragedy, the second-guessing and what-if questions began.
Press said the district has received criticism for not canceling class. He defended this by reminding people school officials let any child go who had a parent ask. Also, grief counselors were on site and it helped to keep hundreds of grief-stricken students from immediately getting behind the wheel of a car, he said.
“Who knows what could happen?” he said.